A readiness to enter into revisionary dialogue with its own theories and
practices, it is regularly if somewhat smugly argued, is characteristic of
Romantic studies as conducted by British and American literary critics at
least over the last twenty years. We have, via new historicism, and
cultural materialism, and the challenge of feminism, long since dislodged
Romanticism from its imaginary isolation outside history and brought its
closed canon of practitioners, the 'Big Six' male poets (Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Keats, and Shelley), into compromised and
fruitful collision with the marginalized voices of other writers of their
age -- women writers, novelists, political writers, and dramatists. And
since old Romanticism was itself the source of our general criteria for
literary excellence, its capacity for critical reflection and renewal, as
new Romanticism, has provided it with a seemingly compelling claim to
anticipate other revisionist activities. In the May 1998 issue of the
electronic journal Romanticism On the Net, for example, an issue
dedicated to 'The Canon and the Web', several contributors offer the
insight that Web technology mimics the associative and / or palimpsestic
models that underlie Romantic theories of writing and of the mind. Not
only, then, does Romanticism inaugurate the canon, it provides, for some
at least, a persuasive theorization of the decentred, democratized,
destablized realm of electronic communication that enthusiasts promise us
will inevitably deconstruct canonicity.

There is a healthy supply of electronic resources dedicated to Romantic
studies currently accessible via the Internet. Meta-indices of humanities
sites, like Alan Liu's Voice of the Shuttle, give directions to
remote textbases publishing electronic editions; to a detailed Romantic
chronology or single author biographies; to course syllabuses and
annotated bibliographies; to ListServs, News Groups, Conferences, etc. The
quality of this information is highly variable, and the electronic texts
not always reliable nor accompanied by details of their history and
provenance; but, then, paper-copy resources can be open to the same
charges. The difference is that it is far easier to go public on the Web
without the intervention of many of the standardizing procedures
associated with paper publication: the decentred, democratized,
destabilized Web world has its downside as well as its up. It is also
noticeable that while some electronic resources represent otherwise
unavailable materials - selected works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary
Robinson, and recently announced editions of Mary Tighe and William Hone,
for example -- there is a strong commitment to complete projects involving
canonical authors (Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley) and canonical forms
(poetry, particularly lyric poetry). It is perhaps not surprising
therefore that Mary Shelley's newly canonical Frankenstein, a tale
of science versus society and itself a demonization of Romantic
creativity, should provide a fitting interface between the technologies of
old paper and new on-line Romanticism: Gothic e-sites abound.

Romanticism. The CD-ROM, edited by David S. Miall and Duncan Wu,
also stands somewhere between the old and the new. This is an electronic
book that wears its bookish credentials more openly than many since it
began life as a Blackwell paper publication, Romanticism: An
Anthology, edited by Wu (1994). Designed as a British intervention
into the market of the course anthology, the kind of book much favoured on
North American campuses and typified by the Norton Anthologies, Romanticism.An Anthology is a thousand-page- plus contextualization of
substantial selections of the six major poets of the traditional canon
within a motley assortment of writings by Romantic also-rans in various
prose and poetry genres. Our 1990s pre-occupations with sexual politics,
slave trade writings, and demotic voices are catered for, but in
homoeopathic doses in comparison with the generous textual space allotted
to Wordsworth, Coleridge, et al. There is something canonically
reinforcing about such modest, annotative revision.

Previous paper assumptions are not unsettled, then, by the information
that the Wu Anthology provides the 'core' or Texts section
of the expanded CD Anthology, newly strengthened by more extracts from
Wordsworth and Shelley, or by the further discovery that other texts are
grouped, in descending order on the 'Writing' list on the Home Screen,
under Gothic, Contexts, and Geography. In a sense, of
course, such a value-laden classification of materials can be and is
immediately undone by the rapid search and retrieval facilities afforded
by hypertext links: I can browse my way through the alphabeticized Index
to Documents and Graphics that brings together from the separate
categories under 'Writing' all the files to do with any author; or I can
dispense with authors altogether and work by geographical area. Since the
retrieved screen-page is not one in a series of pages (as the pages of the
printed book are) but the only page, I can thus work in contrived
ignorance of those areas of the electronic anthology that in paper form
would threaten to engulf or render trivial my own chosen topic of study.
Except, of course, that what I can do by way of establishing the terms of,
say, a female canon of poetry as opposed to conducting a comparative study
of the male lyric voice will remain limited; and the scope for exploring a
female tradition of prose fiction is virtually non-existent. The decision
to convert into electronic form an editorial project only recently
constructed in paper form and then to group around it various
supplementary textual and graphic resources is not easily defended as a
thoroughly planned resource - it is explicable neither as a paper nor an
electronic conception, and there is a large component of happenstance in
its make up. Nevertheless, translated into searchable electronic text,
Wu's paper anthology becomes usefully interactive: references linking one
author or text to another are now live and can be extended beyond the
anthology to contextual sources which, because they can be stored and
accessed as whole texts or substantial extracts, function as more than
mere annotations. Thus, the headnote (Wu, Anthology, 17) keying
Anna Laetitia Barbauld's poem 'Epistle to William Wilberforce' (from Poems
[1792]) to its moment of composition can now take the reader directly
to the relevant extracts from the speeches for and against abolition of
the slave trade in the Parliamentary debate between Wilberforce and
Tarleton, 18/19 April 1791. The reader can then use the green contents
button in the top right-hand section of the page to move from the
Parliamentary debate to discover other documents that may enrich the
precise historical context of Barbauld's poem, like Thomas Clarkson, The
Substance of the Evidence on the Slave-Trade (1789), or that extend
the argument beyond it, like Captain J. G. Stedman, Narrative of a
Five Years'Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam
. . . (1796), with illustrations and maps from the original text,
including four powerful engravings by William Blake. This can set the
reader off in the direction of Blake's lyric 'The Little Black Boy' in
Songs of Innocence (1789). Alternatively, there is the initially
shorter route of a global search of all the text files (it is not
generally possible to search the graphic files) using standard Boolean
logic -- for example, 'slave trade' (41 hits). This is to turn the
function of annotation within the conventional paper edition into
something nearer to the intertextuality which is regularly invoked as a
special condition of Romantic discourse.

From a technical point of view, this is a clearly designed package,
constructed within HyperWriter! from Ntergaid. Texts are presented
within a standard user interface and buttons on screen orient the reader
and provide links. Buttons at the foot of the screen are for navigating up
and down a document, returning to the primary contents page for that
document (Texts, Gothic, Contexts, Geography), and for exiting the
program. Within a document other links, to text, map, graphics, or local
annotations are provided and at the upper right is a more refined
'contents' link, taking the reader to the relevant place in a specialist
table of contents. A top row of buttons provide general functions such as
bookmarks and search facilities. A useful feature for teachers is the
possibility of creating 'tours' through pre-selected texts and graphics
which the student will then follow: three examples suggest how to do this
by assembling materials around the topics of'Imagination', 'Slavery' and
'Chamonix', popular Romantic holiday destination. The quality of the
graphics (there are over 1,200 images) is high as is the presentation of
the texts within a rich yet simple and uncluttered supporting environment.

Harder to defend, except within a teaching package with known
limitations and agreed provisional terms of reference, are the diverse
assumptions by which the contents are assembled. In dominant position is
the Wu Anthology. Under Gothic the reader is given access
not to a further resource of primary texts but to contemporary reviews of
some of the most popular Gothic novels and in some cases to Miall's own
plot summaries and, in a further refinement, in some special cases to more
supporting documentation -- for example, an author's 'timeline' and legal
information for Godwin's Caleb Williams, maps of Edinburgh for
James Hogg's Confessions of aJustified Sinner, and of
Bath to suggest Austen' s Northanger Abbey. When it comes to Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, all the stops are pulled out and we are
offered an iconic map to help locate the novel's supporting framework.
Even more explicitly than in the Texts section, the reader is made
aware of a predetermined evaluation of these novels but is given no
rationale to account for editorial preference and no primary textual data
to help validate or question that choice. Of course, it is easy enough to
surmise that Miall is subscribing to generally accepted critical opinion
in giving front ranking to Godwin, Radcliffe, Shelley, etc, and in
relegating Dacre, Smith, Reeve, and Fenwick. But this is the revisionist
world of hypertext and new Romanticism in which canons are to be
questioned and not imposed. Without examples of primary texts from a
particular genre (novels are too long even for CD publication?) the
impression is strengthened that the new publishing medium is still serving
old formal distinctions. And since certain of the functions we already
take for granted in electronic editions, like global searches, will be
used to refashion canonical agendas across generic boundaries, the absence
of whole areas of literary expression is more than ever a subject for
concern.

The Contexts menu within Romanticism: The CD-ROM

For this reason, amongst others, the Contexts section of the
package is welcome. Classified under various headings, it provides
substantial extracts mainly from discursive prose works: under 'Historical
Documents', useful selections from Helen Maria Williams's Letters from
France (1790-6) and from the 1794 Treason Trials; a reasonable range
of conduct books (by Chapone, Gregory, Macaulay Graham, More, and
Wollstonecraft) under 'Education'; weaker and more restricted
representation under 'Social History' (which is defined exclusively by
texts on penal reform and vegetarianism!) and 'Gender'; but wider
selections under 'Theory: Literary and Aesthetics','The Arts','Science',
and 'Medicine'. Inevitably, there is an air of randomness and
provisionality. One might question in what sense these texts function as
'contexts' any more than any other texts in a hypertextual anthology, or
why Geography and travel writings constitute a separate division
-- except, of course, that in a powerful sense other aspects of the
package imaginatively over-ride its conventionalities of organization.

This is not the case in those areas where a narrow canonical prejudice
has determined editorial decisions of substance, as in the Wu Anthology.
Elsewhere, there is an inescapable impression that immediate
availability and nothing more dictates what is included. Why, for example,
does the reader find through the biographical index that only Letitia
Landon and Sarah Siddons, among the female entries, are provided with a
portrait, when there are two portraits for Godwin and two for Wordsworth?
But, then, Byron has a 'timeline' and a portrait and Blake has neither,
while Keats has a 'timeline' and a 'chronology', and Mary Shelley a
'timeline'. Such haphazard execution betrays the origins of Romanticism:
The CDin a set of computerized personal lecture aids. If we accept its
provisional status as endemic to and in some senses an attractive aspect
of its medium, then, as a teaching resource and a resource for encouraging
independent study at secondary school and undergraduate levels, Romanticism:
The CD has many useful features; but at its current extremely high
price, the prospective purchaser has a right to expect much more. One
partial solution to the limitations of the electronic book of the future
is to access its contents as a set of local files under Netscape (still
packaged on CD). This will allow integration of remote and constantly
updated resources with the designed hypertext; but that still leaves the
issue of justifiable pricing.